It was a slow, rainy afternoon, and my granddaughter had pulled an old shoebox of photos down from my shelf to keep herself busy.
She sat cross-legged on the floor, flipping through them one by one, until she stopped and held one up to me.
“Grandma, who’s that standing next to you?”
I looked at it. A summer day, me in my twenties, my arm around a woman I knew I should know. And for a few long seconds, her name wouldn’t come to me.
It came back eventually. (An old friend from my first apartment.) But those few seconds shook me more than I let on.
Not long before that, I had spent months going through my mother’s photos after she passed. Boxes and boxes of them, and so many faces not one of us could name.
I thought that was her doing. Her unlabeled boxes, her loose ends.
Then I opened my own closet.
Every shoebox up there looked exactly like hers. Loose prints, not a name on a single one. Decades of my life, and no way for anyone to know who half these people were once I’m not here to say.
That’s the part nobody warns you about. You spend your whole life taking the pictures. You never once think about being the last person left who knows the story behind them.
So I started labeling old family photos, my own this time. One shoebox at a time.
It turned out to be one of the kindest things I could do for my kids and grandkids. And I almost didn’t think to do it at all.
Someday I’ll Be the Only One Who Knew
Here is what I finally understood, sitting on my closet floor.
A photo can last a hundred years. But the story behind it does not.
The paper stays. The names fade. And the names fade a lot faster than the picture does.